What I’m Learning from “Hanoi Jane”
What next, after protest, advocacy, revolution, and freedom fighting?
When I think of my aunts and my mother (born 30s to 50s), 1980s images flashes across my mind. I wrote about my aunt vis-à-vis Workout Fonda here.
Those exercise videos that smell not of sweat, but clean wispy hair and feminine active beauty remind me of my aunt.
Jane Fonda also represented a tougher nut to our collective psyche. Her anti-war cries still reverberates today.
Jane Fonda—“Barbarella” to “Hanoi Jane”
Jane Fonda was born 21 December 1937 in NYC to a socialite mother. Her father is famous American actor Henry Fonda. She dropped out of Vassar in 1954, going to Paris for six months to study art.
In 1958, she met Lee Strasberg back in the US. “Barbarella” made her an international sex symbol. In 1971, she won her first (of her four) Oscar playing a call girl in “Klute”.
Meanwhile, the US public is increasingly questioning their country’s role in the war in Vietnam.
Fonda joined a “Free the Army” tour (calling it “political vaudeville”) with fellow actors. In July 1972, she visited Hanoi and was photographed sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. Did at least ten radio shows “speaking to men in the cockpits”.
You feel her passion.
She earned the cute nickname “Hanoi Jane”. The rage and backlash was anything but. Ward Carroll did a 14:00 min video on it here.
I’m born 1986 (so it’s more “Climate Change Fonda” for me), not born in America, thus I’m removed by time and space.
I’ve done my share of mouthing off about war and freedom. I’ve close family in the army.
But this “Hanoi Jane” is Year 4 into war. Isn’t that a bit old for blind passions of any kind?
Or was it time to get radical?
If the people at home in the US are growing restless, fatigued, disillusioned, suspecting they’re being used for greater agendas.
Then how do the men in the trenches feel?
I had goosebumps hearing her call for soldiers to be tried as war criminals. Whoa. Only an open-minded people at home wouldn’t be lynching her off the return flight (did they?).
I can’t imagine how they felt — the men who had to go, the men who couldn’t go, those who chose to stay, and all their their families, felt.
“I tried hard to contribute to the anti-violence and anti-war effort, but I cannot deny that there were moments when I was thoughtless and impulsive in my statements and actions. I sincerely apologize to the soldiers who fought valiantly for their country and their families. I made an unforgivable mistake by going to North Vietnam, and those photos will follow me to the grave.” — Jane Fonda in a 1988 interview with Barbara Walters
Yod, or the Finger of God — Transforming Roots, Home, Security
The birth day chart of Jane Fonda shows a yod, a rare challenging energetic pattern. The yod is both talent and challenge. It drives action.
The harmonious 60-degree sextile is vigorous and complementary between two personal lights:
Sun is your creative ego.
In Sagittarius, it is the potential to adapt and free-range through life. Fire-sign Sagittarius is impulsive until it learns perspective.
Mars is how you act.
In Aquarius, it is for the people, always for freedom (personal definitions may differ). Mars rules war. Feed it ideas about freedom and it’s ready to charge.
Sun and Mars are in an awkward quincunx, the challenge is to express this talent-yet-struggle through Pluto, the planet of transformation.
In Cancer, Pluto destroys the home, families, everything that makes us feel safe and secure.
Cancer craves private, emotional security — Pluto (ruling relationship water sign Scorpio) hates falsity, even if it gives you comfort.
“Ultimately, we must concern ourselves with pulling out by its roots [Cancer] the decadence that controls our culture [Pluto], the profit motive that controls our culture.” — Jane Fonda
The Pluto in Cancer Generation
Pluto takes approximately seven years to transit through each of the astrological signs. It was in Cancer from 1914–1939.
The postwar years 1948–1956 was an unsettling time, no pun intended. Men returned to unrecognisable homes. Women/Mothers entered the workplace. This is the collective vibe that Fonda and her generation were born into.
I first thought “Hanoi Jane” was just a teen, but she was 35-years-old, protesting a turf war that everyone knew was wrong.
So what’s the problem?
To me, for one, she spoke to the “men in the cockpits” calling them “war criminals”. Ouch. That’s the wrong guys.
Some WWII veterans considered her a traitor, for helping the enemy Vietcong. Others thought her naive, but dangerously so. Everyone was fighting on the basis of “home / security” (Cancer themes).
When she was confronted by vets, she apologized for her ignorance and how she was manipulated. She “said” she understood how “everyone else” felt.
In 2005, she explained in her autobiography:
“This is my best honest recollection(…) Someone led to me the gun and I sat down. Laughing and applauding. Cameras flashed. It is possible it was a set-up. I will never know. The buck stops here; if I was used. I allowed it to happen. A two-minute lapse of sanity that will haunt me forever.”
Interesting line: “If I was used.”
Pluto may be demoted by astronomers as a planet but it is considered potent for revealing ugly foundations. When your personal lights (energy, attention, focus, whatever) is yoked onto it or “used”, you’re called into a bigger picture.
But what’s a Jane Fonda to do? Fonda didn’t help her self or talent (Sun) much, or did she? Acting fearlessly/recklessly (Mars) on behalf of freedom.
I can understand how the word “freedom” can acquire a dirty taste in the mouth. It happened again in the lock down years from 2020.
From “Hanoi Jane” to “Jane Fonda Day”
Holding Pluto in Cancer energy means clearing out rot on home issues.
These days the battlefront “home” is Climate Change on Earth.
Fonda is celebrated for it (along with other stars). Los Angeles County declared April 30 “Jane Fonda Day” to honor the celebrity for her environmental activism.
I don’t say yes to what Fonda is charging. “-isms” are hard to debate because it is divorced from ground realities.
You can’t “contribute to” “-isms” except through power play.
Especially when too many -isms are wrapped up thicker than a Vietnamese Banh Mi.
Fonda is speaking for a collective vibe when she said this in 2020:
“This video clip has been circulating widely these last days and someone sent it to me. I was happy and relieved to see that even back in the 80s I was saying what I’m saying now: ‘There’s strength in numbers.’ We must leave our silos and join together to defeat the forces of hate and greed. Together we can win. In the clip I mention the Campaign for Economic Democracy. That’s the statewide organization which my then husband, Tom Hayden, and I started.
It’s the organization that the Jane Fonda Workout was funding. I’m very proud of that. And I’m proud that I understood way back then that homophobia, misogyny, racism, climate change, and economic inequality are interrelated evils and so our movements must also be interrelated.” ―Jane Fonda on Instagram, 2020
Sometimes it takes collective outrage to raise all awareness. You and I then reflect how exactly to place our actions.
Surely all of us desire change for the better. (That’s why politicians use this fundamental call to line any policy.) The world is so shaken that even the pillar of home has to be rebuilt.
Platitudes, even protests, do nothing, unless it hits the raw nerve.
That would be fulfilling the true essence of Pluto.
What do you see about Jane Fonda’s protest efforts?
As within, so without,
Mel, i.e.,